#237 Stuck in Career Purgatory? Darcy Eikenberg on Turning Work Woes into Wins

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.
I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world.
So, you were thinking of quitting your job? Trust me, I've been there many times in my corporate life. You've hit a roadblock.
Each morning, you're dragging yourself out of bed, dreading the day ahead. The obvious vibe feels off.
Politics and gossip are draining,

and deadlines seem endless. Walking away feels like the only way out, whether quietly or loudly.
But our guest today, Darcy Eichenberg, author of the book titled Red Cape Rescue, Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job, says, you don't have to quit to save your career. But how? I know what it's like to feel stuck.
Back then, I wished for someone who could help me find a way out. When reading Darcy's book, I kept thinking,

I wish I would have this when I needed it.

But you don't have to wait.

In today's episode, Darcy and I dive into why staying

might be the best move

and how you can bounce back from a low point.

We are all Incredibles with the superpowers to save ourselves.

Let's get started. Yeah, thanks, Vincent.
And I'm so honored that you saw yourself in the book because it really reflected my own journey. I was a successful professional like you had been for many years.
And every few years got new opportunities. Just things happened.
I followed the next thread of a promotion or a move to a different city. And then one day I was leading a group in my consulting firm.
I was talking to my boss and she told me she was going to retire. All of a sudden, like that was the next step up.
And I realized, wow, I don't want that job. And then in the next moment, I recognized what's next for me.
And this was really a crossroads point in my career because I looked good on paper, right? I looked like I had everything that I needed. I had a great job.
I had great friends, a good company, made enough money. But I realized that I didn't know where I wanted to go next.
And I was trusting my company and just the economy and the environment to push me along instead of me being clear about how I wanted to push myself, what I was being pulled toward. So that started my journey of actually finding my first coach, recognizing I didn't know how to do this.
No one teaches us in school how to navigate our careers. I think we're probably doing a better job now with a generation coming up, but I still think there's a lot of myths out there.
And so I was on my own personal journey of discovery of who was I at this point in my life and what did I want and how could I make a contribution to people, to the world and to my own self? I wanted to make an impact. I never thought that I would have my own business.
I never thought I would be a coach or a speaker or an author. Those weren't thoughts that were placed in my head.
But as I really learned more about myself and I started on my own internal journey, I realized there were skills and talents and abilities that I had that could support people in helping make them better as opposed to me being have to be the person out in front who's doing everything.

Thank you. abilities that I had that could support people in helping make them better as opposed to me being have to be the person out in front who's doing everything.
And I learned about the world of human development, of human potential, which included at the time the world of coaching, personal development. I actually had an opportunity to create an internal coaching business in the company that I had grown up in.
I realized if the right job for me wasn't there, the right job, the next job wasn't there, maybe I can make it up. And so I did.
And you went through a business case process to sell that into the company. And once I got the okay to do that, it gave me an opportunity to see what this new world could look like.
A couple years later, went out on my own and coaching and teaching and speaking ever since about 15 years. So that's how I got into where I am now.
And the book you reference, Red Cape Rescue, Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job. I wrote a couple years ago, and it was really a fumilation of a lot of the learnings that I had, that my clients have had, and people just like you have had about how to get over those stuck places.
When you're on a career path and you get stuck, you hit a roadblock. I've seen too many good people, myself included, stumble at those points and think less of themselves.
I think the lessons that I've learned is that we all have tools in our control that we can use to get out of being unstuck and get back on a path that works for us. Many coaches out there say, I help leaders with this and that.
But I'm curious, in your practice, which specific groups of leaders are you working with? What particular qualities or types of people do you focus on helping and empowering? Yeah, so right now I primarily work with a senior level leader or an executive of a team. I also work with broader teams.
I think there's a myth sometimes that when you're in a higher level role that you don't have the same career fears and questions that you might have when you're growing your career. But the truth is that as you grow, as you're in a higher level position, everything gets even more complicated.
And you have fewer people that you can talk to, feel safe and OK with saying, I don't know what to do next or I'm not sure where I should go from here. We look at people like that and we think, oh, they have all the answers.
But truth is, we're all human. And no matter where you are and what level you are, there are things that we just can't figure out by ourselves, no matter how smart we are, how experienced we are.
So really more of a leader level person at this point in my practice. Although the book is really aimed for people at all levels

in their career. It's one of the reasons that I created it.
Not everybody can afford or invest in

the work of a personal coach. So having something that is accessible, like a book, that is a low

investment, that's easy to read, maybe even fun to read, is an opportunity to help more people. Your book is called Red Cape Rescue.
The first question that came to my mind was, why Red Cape? What is the meaning behind this title? So my company is called Red Cape Revolution. And the story behind that is remembering when you were a kid.
And you'd grab a towel or a sheet and you'd throw it around your shoulders. You'd stand up straight and you felt confident.
You felt in control, even if you were only in control of the backyard. In everything that I've done throughout my work, I've wanted people to be able to regain that feeling.
What would change in our lives at work if we could all have that red cape feeling? If we could all feel like we were confident, our shoulders are thrown back, we were in control. And I believe we can have that feeling.
I just think we don't always recognize it. And we don't always recognize what is in our control, as opposed to waiting for others to change, or waiting for others to tell us what to feel, what to think.
So Red Cape Rescue was a spinoff of Red Cape Revolution, which is what if you could rescue your career? What if you didn't have to change your career or change your job? Anytime you hit a roadblock, you hit that speed bump, you hit that point where you're like, you get news and your boss is retiring and you don't want that job like happened to me. So that's really what a Red Cape Rescue is.
It's a rescue in your career that you can do yourself. So we are all our own superheroes, right? Batmans, Vita-mans, Superman, the Incredibles.
We each have that

hero inside us. And as I read your book, I notice you lay it out in three distinct parts.
Reset how you think

Revise what you say

And reinvent what you do Could you give us an overview of these three stages of transformation? Reset, revise, and reinvent I think it would be really helpful for listeners, whether they are senior, junior, or mid-level, who might feel a bit stuck. A breakdown of this process might give them some inspiration and even help them find a way forward.
Yes, yes. One of the things that was a surprise to me in my journey was when I recognized that there are only three things that we control.
We only control what we say, what we do, and what we think. There's three sections.
Each have chapters within it that break down different ways that we can choose our thoughts, which is something that many of us don't recognize how much control we have over our thoughts. There are details on how we can choose what to say or, in some cases, what not to say.
And then there's detailed chapters in the reinvent what we do around actions to take, how we can think differently about the actions that we take to get unstuck. So they really revolve around the knowledge that we only control those three things.
And like you, Vince, I work with a lot of smart, accomplished people. It's sometimes a surprise to us when we really look at it and we realize what we are trying to control that is out of our control.
We can't control the economy. We can't control what's going on in the world.
Can we make a choice about how we're thinking about it? Absolutely. And can that choice change how we feel, what our experience is of it? We can actually all see the same thing, but make different choices about what we think about it, what we say about it, and what we do about it.
And once we recognize we have the reins of those three levers, only those three levers, we can't control if we ask our boss for a raise, what they will say. But we can take the first step.
We can plan our thoughts, plan our conversation. We can plan our mindset of no matter what they say.
At least we've reached out. We've expressed what we need.
So each of the chapters are really designed to go deeper into different ways that you can work on your thoughts, which again, many people may call mindset. But I do like to think about controlling your thoughts because there are a lot of thoughts that you can choose differently.
The same way with your words and what you do. We can make active choices of those in the same way that you chose the shirt you put on today.
The first section, reset, really resonates with me. Knowing yourself, understanding yourself.
That self-awareness you emphasize is powerful. Once we graduate from college, we are basically on our own with no career center or clear path to guide us.
Yet, we have 30, 40, even 50 years of work life ahead. And even when career centers are available in college or business school, the scope is often narrowed, leaving us without realistic guidance on figuring ourselves out and charting our own course.
So this self-awareness, this self-empowerment that you talk about in Reset, how you think, really feels essential. From your experience working with seasoned leaders and helping them figure out who they are and where they're going,

could you share a few examples?

Maybe one success story and one more challenging case.

Just to give us some insights into the process, the lessons learned, and what navigating those challenges can look like. Story time.
Sure, story time. Sure, one of my favorite stories, and I won't use the names so that they don't recognize themselves because our work is always confidential, but was a leader in a large advertising firm.
She led million-dollar clients who were incredibly successful for the firm, an incredibly big part of the firm, and was up for promotion, up to lead all of the client service parts of the firm, and didn't get it, and got feedback that totally surprised her of a senior leader's opinion that she wasn't ready for, where she was sure she was. And what happens to us when the way we think we are is mirrored back to us differently is we get angry, we get frustrated, and then we start to get depressed and sad and we think, oh, maybe I'm not as good as I think I am.
And what can happen unattended is that somebody can go and start to play small again. But it's hard to get ourselves back revved up when we get knocked down like that.
Fortunately, she had a colleague who'd worked with me in the past who introduced us when we started working together. What we really discovered over time was that whereas that fight or flight kicked in, oh, they don't want me, then I should leave.
But there were a lot of good things in what she was doing. And actually, she hadn't done a clear job of communicating all of the value that she was creating for the firm with the CEO and the other C-suite leaders.
She actually was making it look too easy. And so wasn't getting true credit for it and not in a braggadocious way, but in a way that was honest and consistent and that helped them see the things that I think she was taking for granted.
I call it making the invisible visible, that things worked. The client was happy.
The client was paying their bills. They didn't worry about her.
And so when the situation came up for promotion, she was not really on the radar screen because it didn't seem like there were problems to solve but she had been solving all the problems behind the scenes all along she had been doing the good work so once he recognized she hadn't been using the lever of saying things more often telling her story more often rewriting the story of to the picture of how's leading, not just the being in the doing, but being in the leading people, the leading clients. And in probably it was another year, she had an opportunity to take on a new position in the company.
And to close the loop on that, she stayed at that same agency, just recently became the head of the entire agency as some of those C-suite leaders have now retired. That never would have happened if in that one roadblock, that one, I didn't get to promotion, that fit of mad, that fit of, why don't they see what I do? If she had said, I'm going to pack up my things and go look for another job and had left.
She'd stayed, used the leverage, the relationships, the things she had, and is now really recreating and doing a great job in an important group that's doing a lot of good work. So that's one story of where just that little intervention and then support over time can really make a big difference in someone's career path.
She probably wouldn't have gotten to the opportunity of being in that C-suite level as quickly if she had left and gone somewhere else. I'd love to hear about the other side of things too.

We just discussed a more successful case,

but I'm also curious about the challenges you faced

in helping people through this journey.

Stories where things didn't go as planned.

Maybe there's a single story that stands out

Thank you. Stories where things didn't go as planned.
Maybe there's a single story that stands out, or maybe it's a pattern across different experiences. Whether it's due to a client's own psychology, some part of their past serving as a barrier to change, or something else entirely.
I'll be interested to know why, even with all the interventions, guidance, and effort, things sometimes just don't click. Any insights you can share from these not-so-successful transformations would be valuable.
I'll tell you some of the story about somebody who was getting the mindset was getting in his own way. I had worked with a leader at a large financial services firm and had led a very big team, but they had, during COVID, had gone remote, though the team was more detached.
Part of the team was very much heads down into on computers, working on data, managing fraud, just a lot of very intensive computer-based work as opposed to conversations and decisions and connections with people. And that's what the role was.
His role was to manage that group plus folks who were actually creating new tools. And during a process of getting some stakeholder feedback, he heard that he was coming across as basically very negative and it was holding him back.
And if this was a surprise to him, because he just felt he was being realistic. Times were hard.
The team was very dispersed. Some of the team members weren't happy.
The organization itself was going through a lot of change.

And he fought the external perception of they saw it as negative and didn't feel that it was, that this is somebody that they wanted to promote, that they wanted to give new opportunities to, that they wanted to invest in.

He fought that was not his intention to be negative. His intention was to be realistic.
So this is an example of choosing a thought. And the truth is, both are correct.
It was realistic that things were hard and there were issues in the company and things weren't perfect. People perceiving that the person leaned more negatively was getting in the way of them seeing this person as a potential for the future.
And so I think it's an example of recognizing that we don't have to agree with others' perceptions or we don't have to like everything that's going on, but we can look at the circumstance in a, just as it is. This is just the circumstance.
The circumstance is people perceive this. And then we can make a choice to say, does that get in the way of what I want or not? And he was fighting against himself to some degree of feeling like, I don't want to change how I think.
And where we ended up in really working on this was that you don't have to change what you think, but being aware of how others think helps us to be able to influence them to be able to get more of the things that we need and quite honestly, not get in our way because in an environment where people are scared where there's fear where there's worry and what environment doesn't have that today the people are drawn to people who can be realistic but also be optimistic or be hopeful and then not toxic positivity not butterflies and fairies but to be leaning more toward the future rather than oh my gosh how hard today and the past has been and he had to really work on his mindset to shift that recognizing that to do the things he wanted to do. He needed others to go along with him.
And others were not going to advocate for him, support him, want to be on his team if they perceived that every time they were, it would be negative, pushed down. It would be just feeling very heavy and hard.
So that's an example of where mindset can really get in your way, even if it's just your perspective on what's true. We can be honest about that things are hard without choosing to feel like, oh, it's so heavy that nobody wants to do anything about it.
That's a powerful story. Reflecting on my own experience and those of friends, colleagues, and younger professionals I've met, there's one major barrier that often stands out when it comes to navigating career transitions or even finding ways to stay engaged and resilient in the same role without burning out.
And that's fear. You explore this in your book, and I would like to discuss it further.
Fear is such a powerful force. It can hold us back or, if managed

well, propel us forward. Could you share more on how this fear factor works in career transitions

and how we can learn to manage it better? I can think of so many ways fear plays out, from fear of failure to fear of the unknown. Yeah, I am not one to say, oh, get past the fear, like you don't have to be fear, you don't have to be fearless.
Fear is a natural biological part of how we're built as humans. The truth is that as humans, we all still have a part of our brain.
It's the primitive brain. It is the same biological part of our brain that was in our ancestors when they were faced with tigers chasing them and dinosaurs chasing them.
And that part of the brain, when it gets triggered, sends hormones through our body that create feelings, which is fear. The same part of that brain triggers us when we think about something that might be uncertain or worrisome.
So it's the same thing that triggers if you hear, see an email pop up from your boss and you don't have a good relationship with your boss. It's fascinating when we really look at the brain science and I'm not a neuroscience expert, but this is something that I've studied and talked about with a lot of my clients and recognizing that fear of things that are not going to physically harm you.
Like our ancestors, the tiger would physically harm you. Your boss is not going to physically harm you.
And hopefully in most cases. But the same fear comes up.
The same biological hormones race through our body. So we have to override that with the prefrontal cortex, which is sometimes called the executive brain.
I think of it as the heroic brain. I think of it as the one that is the true you.
The one that knows what does future Vince want? What does future Darcy want? You mentioned the title of one of my chapters is called Listen to the Whispers. You know, that's the one we need to tune into more.
That heroic brain that says, no, you can do this. You can have the hard conversation about why you were passed over for the promotion.
You can confront your colleague about the deadlines that they missed.

You can go to that networking event and meet that executive at the company that you're really interested in. But we talk ourselves out of it.
And the lizard brain, the amygdala, of the primitive brain is what talks us out of it.

So a couple of strategies for that is to talk back to it. One of the strategies, I talk about this in the book, but it's not mine.
I originally saw it in a book called Positive Intelligence. The strategy is to give that negative voice, that lizard brain voice, a name.
So mine is Mrs. Washington, which was a teacher in elementary school.
When that lizard brain comes up, I say, OK, Mrs. Washington, I've got it.
Forget it. I hear you.
And you're just nagging at me. You're just doing your thing.
And it almost makes you smile. And it just separates that fear voice from your heartfelt, your heroic voice.
And just can help you put a beat in there between the action of fear, which might be, oh, I'm going to respond to this email and I'm going to flame him or, oh, I'm not going to do anything or I'll stay home tonight because they don't really want me at that party anyway. It's all these things.
We have to use that executive part of our brain, the heroic brain, to talk back to that fear. Now, there are really good biological reasons when we're in situations

where that fear is physically saving us. I think we know what those are.
When we say, let me not walk on the dark street. Let me not answer the door to somebody who I don't know.
but I think in today's always-on world, we're overusing it. And so we're pulling back and we're hiding.
We're not taking active control. We're letting everything else control us and letting the fear pull us down, as opposed to saying, okay, what's true about this? What's in my control? What choices can I make? So that's the piece about fear.
In the book, I talk about forging a fear strategy of recognizing ahead of time. This is using your executive brain and deciding ahead of time, like when that thing happens, when the next time my boss pops on Teams and says, what are you working on? And that creates fear or worry in me.
I'm going to have a go-to strategy. I'm going to choose a different thought.
I'm going to do something else, but to decide ahead of time, what do I do when the things that make me fearful hit? And so I think we have a lot more control

if we're feeling that we're spending

too much time in fear.

I think it's worth looking and saying,

where do I have control

that maybe I'm not taking control right now?

Great.

I'll definitely try some of the astrologies.

To what month though,

there's so many things we can do

from reading books

and getting professional help

Thank you. To work on, though, there's so many things we can do, from reading books and getting professional help to learning from others.
If you had to give us just a couple of pieces of advice that we can start working, that we can start trying right now, what would those be? I do think first is getting clear about what's really happening. Because oftentimes that lizard brain will want to make up stories about it.
Oh, they're mean to me. Oh, this industry is going downhill.
Oh, my family doesn't do things this way. So I do think that clarity is one of the first foundational pieces.
And I often think we just don't step back and look at a situation honestly and objectively. There's an old phrase that says you can't see the label from inside the jar.
And that's true for all of us. We're all inside our own jar, right? We all have the curse of knowledge and we interpret things differently.
So this is where sometimes even a strategy that people can do on their own is turning on one of the recording devices on their computer or on their phone and just talking about it for a few minutes. Oh, I'm so angry at Joan because she did this and I deserve this and I've done that.
And then listening to it back and pulling out what's the fact, what's the circumstance versus what's my story, my interpretation about the fact. It might might take a couple of times to hear it, but sometimes we're always better.
The research is really clear. We are always better at being able to ascertain somebody else's situation than our own.
So this is a way that if you're just on your own, you can listen to that recording as if it was listening to another person and be able to ask yourself bigger questions like did Joan really say that or is that really what Joan thinks we don't know what Joan thinks maybe our next step is I need to go back to Joan and ask her and say hey help me understand when you said this it made me feel this. I thought it meant that.
Was that your intention? And we offer some scripts in the book. And also there's a companion toolkit that you can get with the book that's totally free, that has scripts and different tools where if you need to start conversations or even put different thoughts in your own head of what you can do there.
Absolutely. Getting clarity on the situation before jumping to solutions is key.
It's always about understanding the problem deeply before trying to solve it. So often, we think we've identified the issue and rush to fix it, only to find the solution doesn't really fit because we misjudged the situation from the start.
Focusing on the core of the problem, giving yourself space to analyze and allowing for clarity before taking action or seeking help can make all the difference. I think clarity also is clarity to what do I want? What is my place in this situation? Why does this bug me? And this may go to understanding your values.
Sometimes when we are, we've hit a roadblock or a speed bump, there is something in our personal values that has been violated. And we don't always articulate what that is.
So understanding that for yourself, I often will say that self-awareness is the new leadership superpower. And really recognizing, like, how am I built? And being clear about that, I think can help you then know what are the ways you can move forward.
If someone presents an issue to you, to your point, there's lots of different ways to solve something, but what is your part in it? Again, back to what you control. You only control what you say, what you do, what you think.
Who am I in this situation? What does it tell me about myself? And sometimes the same situation can be really upsetting to you that's not upsetting to someone else.

So that's why I think the clarity, not just of the situation, but also of you and what

you want and how you're built is equally important.

And we often don't just spend the time to pay attention to that. top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media.

I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.